Chase and the consumer finance advertising opportunity

Chase Bank is launching a retail media network called Chase Media Solutions that will allow advertisers to target its 80MM customers based on their purchase data. From the press release (emphasis mine):

As the only bank-led media platform of its kind, Chase Media Solutions combines the scale and audience of a retail media network with the exclusive advantages of Chase’s first-party financial data, institutional credibility and precise targeting capabilities … With Chase’s owned transaction data, brands and agencies can precisely target customers at scale based on purchase history (such as targeting new, lapsed or loyal customers).

The ads sold by Chase take the form of promotional offers from advertisers on the Chase website and within its app. Users accept offers, which are added to their cards and attributed to ads when redeemed. As a result, attribution is clear, and advertisers can pay on a strict cost-per-action basis.

Chase’s new advertising product not only supports the Everything is an Ad Network thesis, it may be the most distilled example of it. I argued in the original piece that Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) privacy policy and other forthcoming privacy restrictions starved the largest digital advertising platforms of the conversion data that they use for targeting ads, creating the opportunity for any consumer-facing company with sufficient first-party data to launch an ad product. From Everything is an Ad Network:

Each of these companies sees an opportunity to layer ad impressions atop first-party data so as to facilitate proprietary ad targeting. This opportunity is new: while Google and Facebook took 89% of all ad spend growth previously because their enormous reach provided them with the leverage and ability to ingest third-party data from advertising clients, now those advertisers are wrapping their arms around their data and monetizing it…Ad networks are highly profitable, generally running on very thick gross margins and mostly monetizing content and product surface area that already exists. So as the norms for data collection and aggregation change, favoring first-party contexts, the companies that can package together their first-party customer data to attract advertising revenue will do just that.

But unlike, for example, Uber, DoorDash, and Ulta Beauty, which all launched retail media networks since the introduction of ATT, Chase’s first-party data isn’t scoped to a singular commercial use case. Chase has visibility into the entirety of its customers’ commercial lives.

The advertising opportunity for consumer finance is compelling. Very few companies can compete with the scale and breadth of scope of user purchase data that banks and credit cards possess. I’d imagine that other banks and payment platforms — like PayPal, which was rumored to be in acquisition talks with Pinterest in 2021 — will follow suit.